Miles Cameron - The Red Knight

The captain was watching the woods. ‘Not at all, Gelfred. Not at all.’

The trail narrowed abruptly, killing their conversation. Gelfred took the lead. He looked back at the captain, as if encouraging him to go on, but the captain pointed over his shoulder and they rode on in silence.

After a few minutes, Gelfred raised a hand, slipped from the saddle, and performed his ritual.

The stick in his hand snapped in two.

‘Holy Saint Eustace,’ he said. ‘Captain – it is right here with us.’ His voice trembled.

The captain backed his horse a few steps to get clear of the huntsman’s horse and then took a heavy spear from its bucket at his stirrup.

Gelfred had his crossbow to hand, and began to span it, his eyes wide.

The captain listened, and tried to see in the phantasm.

He couldn’t see it, but he could feel it. And he knew, with sudden weariness, that it could feel him too.

He turned his horse slowly.

They were at the top of a bank – the ground sloped sharply to the west, down to a swollen stream. He could see where the track crossed the stream.

On the eastern slope, towards the fortress, the ground fell away more slowly and then rose dramatically up the ridge they had just descended, and the captain realised that the ridge was littered in boulders – rocks big enough to hide a wagon, some so large that trees grew from the top of them.

‘I think I may have been rash,’ the captain began.

He heard the sharp click as Gelfred’s string locked into the trigger mechanism on his bow.

He was looking at an enormous boulder the size of a wealthy farmer’s house. Steam rose over it, like smoke from a cottage fire.

‘It’s right there.’ He didn’t turn his head.

‘Bless us, Holy Virgin, now and in the hour of our deaths. Amen.’ Gelfred crossed himself.

The captain took a deep breath and released it softly, fighting his nerves. The ground between them and the rock was tangled with scrubby spruce, downed trees, and snow. Miserable terrain for his horse to cross in a fight. And he wasn’t on Grendel – he was on a riding horse that had never seen combat.

Not wearing armour.

I’m an idiot , he thought.

‘Gelfred,’ he said, without turning his head. ‘Is there more than one? What is downslope?’

Gelfred’s voice was calm, and the captain felt a spurt of affection for the huntsman. ‘I believe there is another.’ Gelfred spat. ‘This is my fault.’

‘Is this our killer?’ the captain asked. He was quite proud of his conversational tone. If he was going down, he would die like a gentleman. That pleased him.

Gelfred was also a brave man. ‘The one upslope is the killer,’ he said. ‘By the wounds of Christ, Captain – what are they?’

‘Stick close,’ the captain said. ‘You’re the huntsman, Gelfred. What are they?’

He began to ride forward, down the trail to the west. He passed Gelfred, who came in so tight behind him that the captain could feel the warmth of his horse. Down the steep slope to the stream, and he could no longer see the boulders, but he could hear movement – crashing movement.

Across the stream in a single leap of his horse. He could feel her terror.

He could feel his own.

He rode five yards, holding his mount down to a trot by sheer force of will and knee. She wanted to bolt. Ten yards. He heard Gelfred splash across the stream instead of leaping it and he turned his horse. She didn’t want to turn.

He put his spur into her right side.

She turned.

Gelfred’s eyes were as wide as his horse’s.

‘Behind me,’ the captain said.

He was facing their back trail. He backed his horse again, judging the distance.

‘I’m dismounting,’ Gelfred said.

‘Shut up.’ The captain fought for enough mental control to enter the room in his head. Closed his eyes – forced them closed against the crashing sound from the top of the ridge to the east.

Prudentia?

She stood in the centre of the room, her eyes wide, and he ran to her, took her outstretched hand and pointed it over his shoulder.

‘Katherine, Ares, Socrates!’ he called. He ran to the door, grasped the handle, and turned the key while the room spun around him.

The lock clicked open and the door crashed back against his leg, throwing him from his feet so that he fell heavily on the marble floor. The breeze was an icy green wind, and on the other side of the door-

It was caught on his shoulder where he had fallen, and the gale was sliding him along the floor as it forced the door open.

He wondered what would happen if the door crashed back against its hinges.

He wondered whether he could die in the small, round room.

Had to assume he could.

I rule here! he said aloud. He put a knee under himself, as he would if he was wrestling with a big man. Used the key for leverage. Pushed the door with his shoulder.

For a long set of heartbeats, it was like pushing a cart in mud. And then he felt the shift – minute – but the tiny victory lit his power like a mountebank’s flare and he slammed the door closed as his net of power wove itself like a giant spider’s web across the stream.

The horse was fighting him, and the thing was halfway down the hill, coming straight down the track, its bulk breaking branches on either side of the trail while its taloned feet gouged clods of earth out of the ground.

His mind shied away from looking at its head.

He couched his lance, timing his charge.

Horses are complex animals, delicate, fractious and sometimes very difficult. His fine riding horse was spirited and nervous on the best of days, and was now terrified, wanting only to flee.

Gelfred’s crossbow loosed with a flat crack and the bolt caught the thing under its long snout and it shrieked. It slowed.

Thirty yards. The length of the tiltyard in his father’s castle. Because this had to be just right.

The adversarius – the captain had never seen one, but had to assume that this was the fabled enemy of man – lengthened its loping stride to leap the brook.

A daemon.

The captain rammed his spurs into his mount. Sometimes, horses are simple. His riding horse exploded forward.

The adversarius leaped again at the edge of the stream, its hooked beak already reaching for his face, arms spread wide.

It seemed to slow as it crossed the water – vestigial wings a blur of angry motion, maned head with a helmet crest of bone curving above it, spraying spittle as the thing tried to snap at the fine web of Power he had cast over the near bank. It would only last a moment – already the daemon was blowing through the mild restraint the way a big child, angry and frightened, tears through spider web.

He tracked the thing’s right eye with his lance tip like it was an opponent’s crest; the brass ring; the upper left corner of the shield on the quintain. Held in place like an insect pinned to a page, it tried to rear back just as his spear point glanced off the ocular ridge and plunged into the soft tissue of the eye, the strong steel of the long spear head breaking the bone above and below the eye socket, driving the point deeper and deeper, the whole weight of the man and horse behind it.

His lance shaft snapped.

The creature’s legs spasmed and its talons tore into his horse’s forequarters, raking flesh and tendon from bone, flaying the poor animal while it screamed. The captain flew back over its rump on force of the impact, with no brace against his back from a tilting saddle. The horse reared and the talons eviscerated it, its guts spilling onto the road in a great gout.

The daemon got its feet on the ground and its forearms shredded the last of his web of power-